cminblues - 1:09 am on Aug 30, 2002 (gmt 0)

I completely agree with Everyman, only apropos the Googlebar issue.

But it's not a "yadda yadda" [From the Googlebar Agreement], like, I fear, most people think.

The fact is that, with the Googlebar Adv-Features enabled, your internet browsing is logged, in fact, like none of all the well-known spywares [M$ included] do.

I think, moreover, that the only way to force Google at least to rethink its point of view about "Do you want to see PR? Ok, but you must agree to being completely logged", is:

- To making publicly available some little scripts or so [multi-OS], able to retrieve the PR of a gived list of URLs. [Enhanced, of course, with the use of a 'find-working-proxy-now' feature].

It's obvious that G. can't let's this happen.

So, G. must upgrade the toolbar in user PCs, each time the above mentioned script come out.

Please note 1 important thing:

The only way G. may use to stopping the above script, is [and, in fact it's what Googlebar now accomplish] to insert some checksum algo code in the windoze googlenav.dll.

Now I'll explain.

When Googlebar phone home and says:

/search?client=navclient-auto&ch=5608682811&features= Rank&q=info: http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Emicrosoft%2Ecom%2F

Google-home answer with a little bunch of bytes of data, like i.ex with the above example: "Rank_1:2:10"
Which IS (10) the actual PR, in 0/10 scale, of www.microsoft.com

Here, we see that the only thing remaining mysterious, is how "http://www.microsoft.com/" are converted in "5608682811".

If we're able to reverse-eng. this, we've all is needed.

Of course, as stated above, G. may update, every time, the googlebar automatically [without user knowledge of this, and this is another big issue with the googlebar].

But we may reverse-eng. also this new one..

Ok, the tools needed are:

1] A windoze debugger
2] A good knowledge of [Intel] Assembly.
3] A good knowledge of how digest [some non-standard CRC ,in this case, I think] algos work.

Nothing against Google's S.Eng-way.
Only a big, privacy issue.